Near Stradbally in County Galway, a feature that once appeared on an Ordnance Survey map as a hachured marking, the kind of shading cartographers used to indicate a depression or earthwork in the landscape, turned out, when someone finally walked out to look at it in 1982, to be nothing more ancient than a disused gravel pit. The gap between what a map implies and what the ground confirms can be considerable.

The 1933 edition of the OS six-inch map had recorded the feature with enough visual ambiguity to suggest something worth investigating. Gravel pits of this kind were dug across Ireland from the eighteenth century onward, often to supply material for road surfacing or local construction, and they frequently fell out of use once the immediately accessible deposits were exhausted. Because this particular pit dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal archaeological classification, which in Ireland generally concerns itself with earlier remains. It is, in the end, a small hollow in a Galway field, useful once, then abandoned, and cartographically suggestive ever since.